From the author of

From the author of

Over the past few months, I’ve been fortunate enough to work closely
with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard before its release. (Okay, so a lot of folks might
argue that working with prerelease system software isn’t necessarily
something the average person would want to do. But I’m a glutton for
punishment sometimes.) Working with Leopard has made me excited about using it
on a daily basis for my everyday work. It’s also gotten me thinking about
my favorite features and how I’ll be using them to be more productive or
simply enjoy using my computer a little more.

So when my editors at Peachpit Press asked me to write an article about my
top ten favorite Leopard features, I already knew what I wanted to write about.
Read on to learn what we can all look forward to with Leopard.

Time Machine

As someone who has been seriously burned three times by hard disk crashes in
the past 15 years, you think I’d have a good backup strategy. I
do—kind of. I back up the important stuff, like my accounting records and
address book and books in progress, using the Backup software that comes with a
.Mac account. But what about the files that just aren’t easy to back up?
Like images and music and the stray novel manuscript you thought was backed up?
(Yes, I lost one of those, too.)

That’s where Time Machine will make my life infinitely easier.
I’ll just hook up an external hard disk to my computer, configure Time
Machine to back up the contents of my Home folder, and stow the hard disk under
my desk where I don’t even have to see it.

Figure 1 This weird
sci-fi like interface may save your files one day.